Game Face and the Existentialist Hero
by reading-is-in
Summary: A one-bedroom crappy apartment, and two different senses of responsibility. Pre-series.
1. Chapter 1

Game Face and the Existentialist Hero.  
Rated R  
Warnings: Language, philosophy, sexual implications, annnnnngst.

Disclaimer: Supernatural characters belong to Eric Kripke. 'Existentilaistm and Humanism' was originally a lecture deliverd by Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945, later published as a short treatise on moral philosophy beloved by pre-and-first year college students everywhere. This is a not-for-profit work.

If they were staying in one place for more than a couple of weeks, it sometimes became economical to switch out crappy motel rooms for - usually crappier - apartments. This ground floor one-bedroom was one of the worst on a bad list, but the owner had halved the rent provided Dean pick up some 'odd jobs' needed doing around the apartment complex. What she hadn't said was that by 'odd jobs', she meant 'do whatever it takes to keep the building from being condemned, or else I'm out of an income and you're out of a place to live.' But with Dad gone on some indefinitely-extended hunt and the pay the garage gave him, it was all they could get at short notice and probably all they could get at all.  
They had a roof, they had food for now.  
It would have to be enough.  
More importantly, Sam had school - the reason he'd been so particularly desperate to stay put for a while was so he could finish the year. Not that Dad would have given in if it hadn't suited his schedule. Or would he? Dean mused as he slouched low in the drivers' seat, one eye on the high school gates, trying not to fall asleep. There was something different about the kid lately. Arresting. A little scary. Sam had always been intense. But these days he alternated between closed-in silence and bursts of miserable rage. 'He's sixteen', Dean shrugged to himself. All sixteen-year-olds were moody, and Sam did everything to extremes.  
Dean jumped out of his semi-doze at the sharp rap on the passenger-side door. He reached out an arm and undid the manual lock - no-one tampered with his baby in the name of technological 'improvement'. Sam slumped into the seat, one heavy, contained movement, overlong hair falling into his eyes and effectively shielding expression.  
"Okay?" Dean asked out of habit.  
"Nnh," Sam grunted, then, "What the fuck happened to you?"  
"Disagreement with a jack. Cheap-ass piece of shit. It's a flesh wound Sammy, don't worry about it." Sam cast him a measuring look before retreating, somehow, moving backwards into the seat. Dean had been able to jack up a car since he was eleven years old, the birthday Dad promised him the Impala, someday. What Sam did not know was that having been up since six, Dean hadn't gotten to bed until after two between trying to reroute a third-floor shower's pipe and a couple of the crack-heads from down the hall trying forcefully to get him to join their party. He was sleeping on the couch - citing the single bed and Sam's ongoing growth spurt as reasons - but there were other reasons too. Sam had never been an easy sleeper; Dean didn't need him waking up at all the weird hours he was getting to - and up from - bed.  
"How was school?"  
"Okay."  
"Okay? Dude, you're the one who was practically crying for dad to let us stay here. I would've thought you liked it better than okay after that little freak out."  
Sam shot him a deadly glance and curled up against the window.  
"Hey, someone giving you shit?" Dean was suddenly alert, eyes jerking from the windscreen. "Seriously, if some punk kid is-"  
"No-one's picking on me."  
Dean eased the car into a gap between an obnoxious family 4x4 and a grey Toyota.  
"You sure?"  
Sam rolled his eyes.  
"'Cause if someone is, and I mean it, Sammy, you come straight to me. No teachers or any of that crap, that'll make it worse. You come to me and I'll take care of it."  
"Whose else would I tell?" Sam said in a voice that could've been accusatory, grateful, or resigned. Gone were the days when Dean could read the kid like a book - when he could fix everything, simply. He turned into a side street two blocks from their current apartment. It was summer, and daylight lasted until ten o' clock, but the Impala stood out like a gem amongst dirt by the apartment block and he wasn't taking any chances.  
Sam slammed the door harder than necessary, started the walk to their apartment without turning to face his brother. The view of his hunched shoulders, too-thin limbs and increasingly baggy jeans that now ended above his angles cost Dean a twinge of anxiety. The kid seemed to require a near-constant food supply just to look vaguely healthy these days, and their food budget was already stretched to breaking. Predictably, the first thing Sam did when Dean unlocked their door was go look in the fridge:  
"We can get pizza later," Dean apologized for the barren shelves. "Didn't get time to go to the store today."  
"Okay." Sam shrugged and turned away from the open door. Dean raised his eyebrows spontaneously. He'd expected bitching.  
"Take this," he passed Sam a plastic bag full of dirty laundry and picked up a second one himself. "We're out of clothes."

The laundrette in the basement had a total of four washing machines, two of which were typically out of order. The walls were a vague puke-stain colour and the place stank of urine and cigarettes. At the far end of the basement, one of the crack-heads, a tall man with greasy hair between forty and forty-five was hunched to load grey cloths into the single drier. Dean met his sliding glance as the brothers entered and sneered at him in return. The man's eyes moved to Sam, who had failed to acknowledge him. Dean's own eyes narrowed with a sudden pulse of aggression.  
"D'you ever…." Sam said out of the blue.  
"Ever what?"  
The washing machine whirred in front of their eyes as they sat side by side on the wood bench.  
"Hey," Dean nudged Sam's leg with his, "Ever what?"  
"Think about the future." Sam didn't alter his gaze from the blur of laundry.  
"I try not to," Dean snorted. "Twenty-first century ain't exactly looking like paradise from here."  
"I mean your future," Sam said like an idiot should've known that.  
"Uh," Dean was taken aback. "That was random. Like jobs or…."  
"No! I mean don't you ever think - you might want something - else, or different - I mean I know you didn't graduate high school but you're good at lots of stuff…you could do something important."  
"Seems to me what we're doing now is pretty important, Sammy." Dean had half an eye on the crack-head man, who had evidently finished his laundry, but seemed to be oddly reluctant to leave. "I know it ain't always fun. But dad has to be where the jobs are, and we have to be here to back him up. You know he's the best, and who else is gonna carry on after him? We were born to this."  
Sam looked at him flatly for a moment. Then he said,  
"You do know that doesn't actually make sense,"  
And the washing machine pinged. Dean might have taken the conversation further, but was distracted by the man, whose gaze was now definitely less than polite as his eyes followed Sam bending over to start taking washing from the machine. The crack-head's eyes widened when Sam's shirt rode up slightly. Dean let Sam finish and sent him out first. Dean lingered under the pretence of getting change from the wall machine - but as he passed the crack-head he leaned in and said lightly,  
"If I ever catch you even thinking about it again, I am going to kill you."  
"That a threat?" asked the crack-head, suddenly alert.  
"Threats are empty. It's a promise."  
Leaving the basement, Dean dismissed the exchange with Sam from his mind. His little brother got in these I-hate-hunting moods. They tended to evaporate when Sam had a good mystery case to unravel. Dean had more urgent things to worry about. Like the rats he'd heard scratching around in the skirting last night, and how they would pay for the pizza.

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

Sam had a million books – he acquired them somehow wherever they went – and the explicit understanding was that Dean didn't touch them so long as Sam didn't mess with his tape collection.  
"Like I would want to," Sam had said. "Thanks to you and Dad, I get to listen to all of that I can stand in the car anyway."  
"Like I would want to read your geek-boy books," Dean had returned.  
And so they had ignored each other's treasures. That's why Dean was surprised when he entered the bedroom and Sam hastily stuffed whatever he'd been reading under the covers.  
"Becoming a man at last, little brother?" he teased. "There's Playboy under the couch."  
"Ha ha."  
It was Sunday night – Dean's day off from the garage – which meant he'd got enough work in the flats done that he actually had an hour or so spare after dinner. He'd tried watching TV, but the reception went out. Dad wasn't answering his phone, again, so Dean thought that baiting Sam for a little while might help him keep from worrying.  
"So what is it?" Now his curiosity was aroused and he made a grab for the hidden book.  
"Nothing," Sam blushed, trying to shove him off. "You wouldn't even be interested. I'm putting the light out."  
Dean employed tactics: goading Sam into punches that left the prize unguarded, and after a brief struggle he held up the dog-eared paperback. It was short – like, the length of a comic book – and the cover was white. On the front were three words, only two of which Dean recognised, and a name:  
_Existentialism and Humanism.__  
_Jean-Paul Sartre.  
Dean snorted – 'this should be good' – and opened the book to a random page to read theatrically: ""Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does."  
Silence.  
"Give it back," Sam demanded.  
Now Dean could see that the book had been well-used: pages creased and some phrases underlined. He flicked through until he got to another one: … "what is not possible is not to choose. I can always choose, but I must know that if I do not choose, that is still a choice.  
"Jesus," Dean laughed, a little strained. "For a guy who's supposed to be that smart, he sure repeats himself."  
"You don't even know what it means," Sam said reproachfully.  
"I pretty much get the picture. One of these liberal types, right? Do what you want when you want it? I guess none of them ever had to survive in the real world."  
"What the hell do you mean by that? You call this 'real', Dean?" Sam was suddenly furious. Inexplicable.  
"I call it pretty fucking real when I have to work all day to keep food on the table, yeah."  
'Or keep you from getting assaulted in basements. Jesus…'  
"You don't _have_ to though, do you? It's a choice."  
"What the fuck are you on about?" Dean was part angry, part bewildered. He sat down on the edge of the bed. "You want to go out to work?"  
"No…I want to go to school. So I am. But I never asked you to take care of me, did I. You could leave, if you wanted to. You choose to stay in this shitty life. I – I don't…" Christ. Now Sam was going to cry. Dean fought the immediate impulse to put his arms around him, though Sam had stopped welcoming that more than a year ago. But Sam didn't cry. In an impressive display, he breathed deeply and raised his chin. "I might choose something different."  
"Oh yeah? Like what?" Dean's scepticism hid a moment of panic. Sam got stupid ideas once. When he was eleven he'd decided to run away, and actually gotten as far as the neighbouring state line. For once they'd been forced to give the police their real names. That night had been the first and only time John Winchester raised a hand to one of his sons, and the last time Dean saw him cry.  
"I could go to college, you know. I could get tuition and everything. I'm smart enough…"  
"No-one's questioning. We all know you're the brains. Just – God, Sam, it can't happen. You know it can't. This is the hand we were dealt, and it sucks sometimes, but hey – we have fun, don't we? We have good times?"  
"_You and Dad_ have good times," Sam said carefully. "And I am not like you. I love you, Dean, and I love dad – but I am nothing like anyone else in this family. And this – is not what I want."  
"Yeah well," Dead stood up abruptly, glaring at the offending book: "Can't always get what you want, can you. I want a steak dinner with all the trimmings: tough shit. Go to sleep." He walked to the doorway and hit the light-switch. The bulb buzzed and then died. Sam turned over and pretended to go to sleep: as if he could fool anyone with the tensed rigour of his body. It was alright for college brains in some fucking study in France. It was alright for Sam. He was born second: he could afford to want things which couldn't ever happen. Somebody had to keep them safe. Fed. Dean had to be realistic.

John Winchester arrived home two days later. During those two days, Sam and Dean had talked little. Their subjects were food and the garage and reaffirmations that no-one was picking on Sam at school. Like a sparsely recorded cassette with a lot of static that had got stuck in a loop. The loop broke with John's arrival. Dean sprang up from the wooden crate they were using as a kitchen chair and stood to excited attention, visually scanning his father for damage and relieved to find nothing obvious. John released him with a smile and gesture that they could hug.  
"You get it?" Dean asked. "I got it," John confirmed, heading into the adjoined living area to slump down on the coach. His movements were weary but satisfied. Self-contained. Final. "You been taking care of things here?"  
"Yes sir."  
"That's my boy. Where's your brother?"  
"Some after-school thing. I think math club."  
John looked vaguely disapproving. "Yeah well. If he's going to finish the school year I guess it can't hurt any. Get me a beer, would you son?"  
Dean was halfway to the fridge.

Across town, in the deserted hallway of Williams High School, Sam Winchester was sitting on the floor between a block of lockers and a drinking fountain. He held a brown manila envelope, and in the other hand, a red-and-white A4 booklet. It was open to the first page.  
_Thank you for considering Stanford University as one of your college options_, Sam read for the fifth time. They were all words he knew, yet somehow, they failed to form a logical sentence together. If his chest would stop feeling so tight and his stomach un-knot, if he could breathe better, he was sure they would all fall into place. 'Man up, he told himself grimly. 'What'll you do with the entrance exam if you can't even decode the brochure?' He closed his eyes and imagined the annotated page he wanted:

_Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realises himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is._

T_hank you for considering Stanford University as one of your college options, _Sam read for the sixth time.

- Fin - 

Well, hope you enjoyed! Please leave feedback to tell me what I did right or wrong.  
Oh, and just in case it needs disclaiming: that is indeed what the Stanford brochure says. I made up the high school name, though no doubt about ten of them exist. No connnotations intended. xx


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